


What Else Is There?

by powercorruptionlies



Category: Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Genre: Family, Gen, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2020-10-09 04:11:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20492096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercorruptionlies/pseuds/powercorruptionlies





	1. The Armenian Genocide

Armenian looks, if you’re willing to think about it, like the word American. Not congruent, but similar. That’s what Ruzanna, all of twenty-three, thinks as she sits cradling a soft parcel in her emaciated arms.

The so-called parcel is a baby, swaddled in a ripped light-blue blanket knitted carefully by her mother, who liked to belabour things. Oh, Hovhannes. Pretend for me. Pretend to be American.

He’ll have a hard life, her husband, also a Hovhannes, decides about fifty miles from the American shore. But not in as many words. He was a carpenter, for god’s sake, not a linguist. Nothing fa-fa for Hovhannes, and so help him god if his son wasn’t the same. Looking down at his son, he could almost certainly _smell _something effeminate and cowardly about him, but he put it down to seasickness and the faint rumour of bile caking his throat. He hated sea fare. 

They land in America, Europe firmly behind them, despite the fact that Americans are intertwined in Europe’s petty fight. It’s cold. The Statue of Liberty looks grey; they sky is grey; the sea is grey. It’s all grey. Grey, grey, grey. Ruzanna looks around desperately for a splash of colour, how difficult could that be? Land of the free home of the... what?

Hovhannes' eyes aren’t grey. They’re brown, deep brown, nearly black. You can see your whole damn reflection in them, those big, huge eyes.


	2. English Letters

Hovhannes Yossarian Sr. would turn out to have a very good sense of smell, and be all the worse off for it. Nothing enraged him more than his son, now dubbing himself ‘John’ after an onslaught of naturalised siblings – Emma and David. He was no longer Hovhannes Sr., but a sole Hovhannes living in a Hovhannes-less land. That made him angry; Hovhannes likes to let _John _know it makes him angry.

It was a task and a half to get John to play ball anyway, Ruzanna (now Rose) would argue to her husband late into the night, but it’s an even harder one if you’ve just gotten done beating the poor thing. 

Hovhannes, refusing to naturalise himself despite the pleas of his employers and wife, sat in a gruff silence, languidly lighting cigar after cigar until his wife just _went the fuck to bed_. His children didn’t know much Armenian. He didn’t know much American. That made him angry, too. John reads in English, even the books Hovhannes read as a child in the beautiful language of Armenian. The Pied Piper – a wonderful tale. Hovhannes didn’t approve of reading, however, especially as his son was approaching twelve years old and should be dedicating his time to worthwhile activities - like sports.

_‘But pa, hardly anyone gets a job in sports,’_

_ ‘You could get job in damn military. Keep fit, do whatever. No one achieved anything with words.’_

Besides, the stories sounded much slicker being read in Armenian, any Eurasian dialect for that matter. Cussing sounded just fine in any language, though. It made his son flinch harder when spat in English. The light at the top of the staircase flicks off, John had put down whichever book his enabling mother had unearthed for him recently. There was no use arguing with Ruzanna, she'd defend that sorry excuse until the day she died. The night was strange. Hovhannes was rather alone now that all the lights were out. Embers burn out just underneath his nose, and the world is truly pitch black. How he wished he hadn't run towards America, all those years ago. He won't go to sleep for another few hours.


	3. Iridescence

In ordinary places, the world gleams. 

Yossarian (he dropped John completely, after the most recent _'accidental baseball to his temple'_, courtesy of Hovhannes _'missing David's mitt'_) grips to this objective truth. The trio of port decanters in Ms. Brodie's dining room gleam in the sunlight, rainbows highlighting the hexagonal plates of glass that compose the decadent sculptures. More money in three objects than his parents have ever seen, than he has ever seen. He waits for his mother to finish scrubbing the wood stove, for which she’d earn around a tenth of the value of one of the decanters.

He walks home in silence, mother by his side, he assumes. There’s a puddle of oil nestled right beneath the sidewalk that has stripes of colours marbled through it, just as the glass had. His house was nothing of the sort. Beige carpet, wood walls, earthy furniture. Tweedy. The most colourful thing he can remember in the confines of his house are the blues and purples, occasional reds, of the bruising on his elbows and knees, and the subsequent and complementary pattern on his father’s knuckles.

He doesn’t have many friends, if any. No one in America likes it if you’re don’t shine a bright white, or radiate synthetic colours. Yossarian likes the muteness of his home, it stops him getting so many headaches.

His mother still won’t tell him why he gets headaches. She gets them, too, though. Sometimes, to go along with it, he gets very, very low. He feels like he might die. Nothing stops the organ in his chest from grotesquely and pointedly jabbing at his ribcage and the tissue in between. His mother gets that, too.


	4. Stained Glass Stains Walls

For the last time in his life, he sits lucidly on a damp pew. He compares the girl he met the night before to how the pastor discusses, and always has discussed, women as an idea, and intellectual concept to be debated. They're nothing alike, he finds.

He looks to his mother. How did she stand for this? A dismantling of her own personhood, and his sister… she sits there nodding, as she had for as long as he’d known that this particular pastor subscribes to this particular belief, taking in all of his _lies _like a turgid sponge. He checks out, staring at the way Jesus’ upper-half rises grandiosely above the rows of deans sitting complacently behind the steeple.

He's flying out to Midwest tomorrow. The airbases had been erected there, possibly overnight, Yossarian wouldn't know; just like war had been declared, possibly overnight, Yossarian wouldn't know. Yossarian, though pathologically averse to displaying this outwardly, had elliptically consoled himself in the mould-covered bathroom whilst the rest of his family slept in the adjoining rooms. 

_ 'I've never been to the Midwest. There's no harm in trying new things - until those new things get you killed and blown to pieces and impaled with blood-smeared glass.'_

He realises that everybody has stood, singing a long-forgotten hymn that he just about moves his mouth correctly to. Amen, everybody finishes with, but Yossarian still can't find his own voice. Hovhannes - no longer _dad_, or _papa_, or _hayrik - _glowers at him from the other end of the pew, and Yossarian faintly wonders if this is what dying with glass in between your ribs would feel like. 

The Yossarians are among the last to leave the church, Emma desperate to flirt lazily, like the passing of a blazing-hot summer afternoon (you get a lot of those here, in New York, Yossarian thinks. I wonder if you get them way out west. I wonder if they still have them in Armenia, if they ever did. Something tells him it's not the same), with one of the nice, respectable, white-bread American boys from a better part of the town. He discards her. Yossarian watches this. Yossarian turns away. 

'Ma, I'm gonna walk myself home,' he says, seeing that this after-prayer congregation was far from dissipating. She nods, and goes right back to discussing Pearl Harbour. 

That _had _happened, overnight - Yossarian did know. 


End file.
